The Medieval Church · c. 767; surviving in Ibn Hisham's edition, c. 833
The Life of the Messenger of God
Sirat Rasul Allah
Ibn Ishaq, in the recension of Ibn Hisham · c. 704 – 767
What it is
The earliest biography of Muhammad. Christians appear throughout: the monk Bahira who recognises the boy's prophethood, the Negus of Abyssinia who shelters the first emigrants and weeps at the recitation about Jesus and Mary, and the delegation from Najran who dispute the Trinity with him.
Why it lasted
The source of nearly everything later tradition says about early Islam's contact with Christians, including the Bahira story that Christian polemic would invert for centuries into the claim that a renegade monk taught Muhammad.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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